wesleyd

Once upon a time, many years ago, I was working in a bar in rural Ireland. I was 16 or 17, I was alone in the place, it was a slow afternoon, I was crouched down, putting bottles on shelves, idly wondering what the strongest drink - highest ABV - in this place was. Most spirits were about 40%, many less, some slightly more. At that moment I happened to look up and I swear a beam of sunshine at that moment lit on a bottle of green chartreuse above my head, highlighting the “55% ABV” on the label. In my memory, music also chimed. I just had to taste this stuff, so I poured a tiny drop into a glass. O. M. G. It. Was. _Vile_. To this day, it is my benchmark for how bad something tastes.

I believe these are called “monobloc” and they exist, but are rare in the US.

There is a line in 30 rock "I don't know anything. I get all my news from the radio in Grand Theft Auto” and I aspire to this level of ignoring the “News”.

Even when I go coldest turkey, I’ve found that actually important news will find me, often in a way that makes it easier to judge for myself whether it’s good or bad.

Ha, yes, I really ought to have linked to that here. Thanks for doing that!

This article feels like a hit piece on Air Conditioning. Some groups seem to regard AC as somehow morally weak and even evil, and while the sentiment resonates with me - I grew up in Ireland! I never even saw the _point_ of AC until I moved to California! - attempts, like this one, to damn AC with logic always feel kind of, well, obtuse. They seem to deliberately miss the main benefits of AC. Which are:

1) AC literally saves lives. Continuing to reject it in hot countries is kind of evil.

2) AC is efficient. Each kWh of heat sucked out of buildings uses a fraction of a kWh of electricity.

3) AC's electricity use is strongly correlated with when the sun is shining brightest. It is the greenest (man-made) energy use I can imagine!

And, most importantly:

4) AC nowadays is almost always installed so it can work in reverse, as a "heat pump". So countries that currently heat their buildings with natural gas or other fossils, would actually _reduce_ their total carbon burden by installing AC everywhere! Because they can use these instead of burning fossils in winter! Doubly so in countries avec lots of nuclear generation, but even if they don't, burning natural gas or even coal to make electricity to drive a heat pump emits less carbon than burning the same natural gas to heat a house! (Citation needed!)

I have a pet conspiracy theory that the anti-AC lobby in Europe is funded by Big Fossil. It seems silly, even to me, but it's not totally illogical: widespread AC installation in mainland Europe will inexorably reduce dependency on oil and gas for heating, first by burning less of it to make electricity to drive a heat pump rather than by burning it directly, and second by making it _possible_ to substitute renewables for it.

Humans seem to be wired to weigh negative news much more strongly than positive news.

(The most plausible hypothesis I’ve found for this is that bad news - fire, predators nearby - has historically been much more likely to kill you than good news to benefit you, so we are descended from people who over-weighed bad news, and survived to reproduce.)

Modern media seems to really lean into this. All takes on everything are The Worst Possible Take. I heard Twitter described yesterday as “gain of function research for takes”. It’s not that the takes have to be bad, they just have to provoke a strong reaction, and bad news just gets a stronger reaction in humans.

“Cure for death found - social security bankrupt!!”

We have become more anti-fragile: and good things are way more likely to benefit us than before, and bad things less likely to harm us. Eventually we will evolve into this, but it will take literally generations!

Anyway, given people’s tendency to give bad news more weight, and given that most media is strongly negative, it is no wonder that people can come to believe that everything is terrible and that we are all doomed and that humanity has never had it worse. This seems absolutely ridiculous to me, comically so, but it seems almost tautological to many people. And telling them that things are actually great can seem like an attack!!!!!

If people don’t carefully curate their media environment, it is almost inevitable that they’ll become negative about the future. I don’t know what to do about this in general, but I know that I have to be very careful about what I consume. (And be gentle toward people who have been harmed by consuming too much negative for too long. I don’t think a psychologist can help though!)

When I renewed my H1B visa (I think after three years), I had to leave the US to do it. I couldn't renew it from inside. The permission to work got renewed just fine - I could just keep on working for another three years - but if I left after the first visa expired, and wanted to come back, I would need a new _visa_ (thing stuck into my passport) to come back, and I could only apply for that while outside the country.

I read that it used to not be like this, that it used to be possible to renew the _visa_ itself from inside the US, but that got changed before my time. I can only imagine that the reason for that was that non-citizens inside the US are entitled to due process, but non-citizens outside the US are not. And denying a visa to somebody outside the US is therefore a lot easier than denying it to somebody inside the US, and essentially cannot be appealed.

When I applied for AOS form H1B to Green Card, I didn't have to leave the US. With this change, I would have had to. The only reason I can think for this change is that denials of AOS would now become unappealable. I hate this.

I don’t even think Costco is all that cheap!

Yes, many things are slightly - a few percent - cheaper than many other stores, per unit weight/volume, but it’s not a a big difference. Some things are more expensive though, like meat and fish. It seems “cheap” only if you do most of your other grocery shopping in premium grocery stores (eg Whole Foods). I do most of my grocery shopping in Market Basket, and it’s about the same as Costco for most things I buy. And everything comes in normal sized portions!

Costco’s real benefit is that everything they sell is pretty good stuff, and nothing is outrageously overpriced. Eg They sell Goya beans, for more per can than supermarket brand beans, but less than Goya beans in supermarkets. Many things are like this. You can assume that the things Costco sells are The Good Brands, but you can get most things cheaper if you’re not brand sensitive.

There are many things for which buying in bulk is a false economy: I will *ever again buy Costco-sized containers of eg yogurt covered raisins, or praline covered almonds! I suspect that every trip to Costco used to raise my average body weight for the next year by half a pound. Especially if I went to Costco hungry! Never go to Costco hungry!

Oh man, I love that we live in a world where an eight second 0-60 is considered anemic! For a truck!

(Not digging at you, I feel the same way you do. I just think it’s weird and amazing!)